“From what Fitzroy said when I told him I was going as far as the pier unaccompanied it seems to me that you staid Britons can be freer if not easier,” retorted Miss Vanrenen.
Her friend smiled sourly.
“If he disapproved he was right, I admit,” she purred.
Cynthia withheld any further confidences.
“What a splendid morning!” she said. “England is marvelously attractive on a day like this. And now, where is the map? I didn’t look up our route yesterday evening. But Fitzroy has it. We lunch at Winchester, I know, and there I see my first English Cathedral. Father advised me to leave St. Paul’s until I visit it with him. He says it is the most perfect building in the world architecturally, but that no one would realize it unless the facts were pointed out. When we were in Rome he said that St. Peter’s, grand as it is, is all wrong in construction. The thrust downwards from the dome is false, it seems.”
“Really,” said Mrs. Devar, who had just caught sight of Lady Somebody-or-other at the window of a house in Hove, and hoped that her ladyship’s eyes were sufficiently good to distinguish at least one occupant of the car.
“Yes; and Sir Christopher Wren mixed beams of oak with the stonework of his pillars, too. It gave them strength, he believed, though Michael Angelo had probably never heard of such a thing.”
“You don’t say so.”
The other woman had traveled far on similar conversational counters. They would have failed with Cynthia, but the girl had opened the map, and talk lagged for the moment.